To my mind, the ~15-year focus invites us to think big (i.e. not a feature here or there, but to imagine Wikimedia's role in the world in 2030, and in our context here, what Wikisource might be within that role).This, in turn, brings me back to a point I brought up in Vienna in 2015: Wikisource's identity question, vis-a-vis other digital libraries. In particular, assuming not just business-as-usual in coming years (i.e. Project Gutenberg adding more books), but also obvious and long-awaited developments like national libraries becoming more serious and more effective in digitizing *and making accessible* their out-of-copyright collections. In such a world, what might Wikisource's unique value be?My own answer, in line with our Vienna answer to the identity question, is that it is our human curation and meticulous attention to detail that sets our project apart from other (better funded and larger-scale) digitization efforts. We are able to create high quality, hyperlinked (and semantically-linked, i.e. Wikidata) metadata to describe the texts we produce.If we accept this line of reasoning, what might be the significant role our unique advantage might play in 15 years? What might we work towards to get there? I don't have a clear vision, myself, but I have a strong intuition/belief that it is to do with our curation and metadata production, more than with our raw transcription production. This would imply a fairly radical shift, in both labor and technological attention, and I am not at all sure the Wikisource communities are interested or ready to make such a change. I have sketched one example of the immense value our volunteer communities might produce with our parallel and multilingual volunteer labor in The Aboutness Project and the Table of Contents of Everything project, documented here:(which I have alas not made progress on in the last year.)I'd be very interested to hear other opinions about the future I painted above, or other futures you see vis-a-vis Wikisource with a ~15-year perspective.Cheers,A.(volunteer hat)On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 10:11 AM Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84@gmail.com> wrote:______________________________It's a complex and collective process, and if you are confused, don't be: everyone is ;-)Dear all,as you probably have heard, a process for writing the strategy of Wikimedia has started in these days.Conversations are starting to pop everywhere on Meta, on Wikipedias, on Wikisources, probably even on Facebook.Here you can find a briefing, an initial overview of potential topics that may come up across various strategy conversations. I suggest you give it a look to understand the scope of this whole plan:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_ movement/2017/Process/Briefing
The question we are asked to answer is this:
***What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?***I'd like you to go back in your community and join (or start) this conversation,but also share *here* some of your insights and opinions.
We'll polish these thoughts afterwards: this is the time of speaking your mind and dream big.Aubrey_________________
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